


Romance Its Vissitudes

by Emeraldwoman



Category: New X-Men: Academy X
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:29:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1631558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emeraldwoman/pseuds/Emeraldwoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Many thanks to Betty and Miggy for their beta reading!</p><p>Written for puritybrown</p>
    </blockquote>





	Romance Its Vissitudes

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Betty and Miggy for their beta reading!
> 
> Written for puritybrown

 

 

The week before Christmas, Victor walked out of the shower cubicle and into Santo. He sat down hard, clutching his towel.

Santo laughed for a minute straight. "Hey, have you seen Megan?"

Victor started brushing his teeth. "Pixie?"

"Yeah." Santo held up a stick of something greenish. "I got this for her."

Victor squinted at it. "Is that mistletoe?"

Santo looked self-satisfied. "Yeah."

"You and Pixie?" Victor blurted through a mouthful of foam.

"Hey!" Santo said. "I'm telling you, I've seen the signs. She wants my rocky bod."

The images were in his head and he would never get them out. "Oh my God," he sputtered. "Stop. Just stop."

Santo looked faintly injured. "Hey, man, I don't complain when you talk about your lovelife."

"I don't talk about my lovelife."

"But you could! I wouldn't mind." He scratched his chest, a weird sandpapery sound of stone on stone. "You could even tell me about the buttsex," he offered generously.

Victor clamped his hands over his ears and backed away, making noises that owed nothing to coherent argument and everything to wordless horror. He had to take his soft hand away to fumble for the door handle, just in time to hear Santo shout, "Dude, we're friends! I'd tell you if I had buttsex!"

The first class of the day was art with Mr Rasputin. Vic wasn't any good at it, but he liked Art anyway, maybe because it was nearly the only class that had never been interrupted by Sentinels or an alien invasion or a crazy Danger Room or Miss Frost doing something that looked evil but possibly wasn't.

David finished his charcoal sketch of the fruit bowl first.

"That looks good," Victor said.

"It's cheating," David said. "I know everything Colossus knew about technique."

"It still looks good," Victor told him, and rubbed at the lines on his own sheet. His apple looked more like a pear. His soft wrist ached. The hard hand had already torn through two sheets of paper, so now he had to use the other one for everything.

"I don't know," Nori said, poking her own head around her easel. "I think it lacks heart. Passion."

"You can't even see it from there," David snapped.

Nori stared straight through him. "I bet I'm right. Am I right, Vic?"

"Leave me out of it," he said at large, and bent his head over the easel. He tried to ignore the fight that progressed in harsh whispers and biting replies, but art class had already been ruined.

Victor wanted to say hi to Josh at lunch, but he was sitting with Alani, and his right hand and her left were under the table. So Victor raised his eyebrow and got a quick grin in response. It was the most normal thing Josh had done in months.

Sooraya brushed past him with her tray, and then paused. "It is good that he's happy," she said. Her voice was oddly wistful.

"Yeah," Victor agreed. The light reflecting off Josh's skin spilled over Alani's face, gilded her light brown hair. She was squinting a little as she looked into Josh's eyes, smiling.

Victor sat down with Ben and Paras and started putting his sandwich together. Santo's tray clattered down beside his. "Watch this," he said, nudging Victor with a rocky shoulder.

Mr Summers cocked his head in that vague look that meant telepathy and hurried away, leaving most of his lunch on the plate. Victor tensed, but none of the other X-Men moved. It couldn't be a real emergency.

"Private message from Frost," Santo said. "She just went into the Blackbird. They're totally gonna do it."

"It could be a private mission," Ben said.

Santo laughed. "A private mission to her pants. They're heading straight to the Mile High Club."

"Every time I think I hate you as much as I can, I am wrong," said Paras, and carefully peeled an orange.

"Speaking of doing it, Josh and Alani," Santo said. "Man! How come he gets all the hot chicks?"

"Why do you care? You're in love with Pixie," Victor said.

"Dude! Confidential!"

Paras laughed and offered Victor half his orange. In the winter noon light, the orange flesh looked weird against his purple palm. Victor picked up the fruit and turned himself orange. Paras laughed again.

"Get a room," Santo said, and was still demanding to know what he'd done wrong when Victor broke a chair over his head.

After Colossus pushed them apart and Beast told them to save their youthful aggression for more fearsome foes, Victor went for a walk in the mansion's empty upper floors. There might never be enough mutants to fill up the whole school again, but every time the mansion exploded they rebuilt all the dormitories anyway.

Victor wasn't sure what he thought about that. Sometimes it was stupid and pathetic, and sometimes it was hopeful and determined. Maybe it could be both.

He was passing by a janitorial closet on the third floor when Pixie poked her pink and black head out of the door and beckoned him in.

He obeyed, only slightly startled when she closed the door behind him. The closet was pungent with fake pine and the musty smell of stale water.

"Santo is looking for you," he offered.

"I know! I'm hiding!" She put her tiny hand on his hard shoulder, her toes not quite touching the ground. Her wings fluttered to keep her level with him as she leaned in close. He tried to not to inhale any of her dust. If you spent any length of time close to Pixie you started having some really strange thoughts.

Possibly, Pixie was having some strange thoughts of her own. Her lips were pursed thoughtfully as she regarded him.

"Uh," he said.

"So! We were thinking! We should really find you a guy!"

For a moment, Victor hoped that he'd misheard her. She had that lilting accent that was like speaking through a mouthful of water; it was possible. "Who is we?"

"Me and Alani. You're really nice! You should be happy!"

"Good?"

"Right! So, who do you like? Julian? David? You can't have Josh because Alani really likes him."

"It doesn't work like that," Victor said.

"Why not?"

"They're not gay."

Pixie's mouth opened a few times. "We could talk to the Cuckoos?" she suggested dubiously. "This one time, they made me believe I was a cat. But that was when there were five of them and they were sometimes fun."

"Stop talking," Victor said firmly, and pushed past, very careful not to hurt her with his hard hand.

Santo was lumbering down the hallway. "Hey-" he said. "Hey, dude, I wanted to apologise but not like with people listening. Anyway, whatever. Sorry."

"Pixie's in the closet," Victor said, and then winced.

"Hah, good one!" Santo opened the closet door anyway and paused, looking like someone had hit him with an even bigger rock.

"Um," Pixie said and stared at Santo with huge black eyes. "Do you like movies about cheerleading?"

Victor climbed out the window.

It was cold on the roof, but at least no one would talk to him there. Victor turned himself the same colour as the snow, and watched Nori shout at David in the back garden. It wasn't really spying. Anyone could watch them from the windows, and probably most of the students were. When Max had been alive, he'd sometimes taken bets on relationship lengths.

"Anole."

"Mother of _God_ ," Victor said, and jumped backwards. The roof was too slick, and he started sliding down the slope, scrabbling for balance under the snow.

X-23 caught his hard wrist with both hands and hauled him back up to the ridge. Her expression didn't alter as one of the spikes punched through her palm.

Victor watched the wound heal and calculated his odds for surviving the conversation.

"I am worried about my feelings," X-23 said.

Victor swallowed his first response, and went for "Why?"

"I'm worried that if I feel emotions that are too strong, I might hurt people." She gestured at Nori and David. "Do you think one of them will kill the other?"

"No," Victor said firmly, and then wondered if that was true.

"Most homicides are committed by people who loved the dead person. I have only killed one person I loved." Her voice sounded oddly hopeful. "Statistically, this is a small proportion."

"Why are you talking to me about this?"

She frowned slightly. "I talked to Cessily. She said you might understand my feelings."

"For Julian?"

"For Sooraya."

"Oh," Victor said. "Oh, um, wow."

"Do you understand?"

"I... a little, maybe," Victor said carefully. "But I don't have the same feelings you do. And I can't tell you what to do with them. No one can."

For a moment, Laura looked like a real girl. "I knew Cessily was wrong. But I wanted to believe."

"As far as I can tell, it all hurts," Victor said. "Loving someone, them loving you back. Wondering if it can last, if you'll get hurt, if you'll hurt them, if they'll die in the next apocalypse. You could just stay out of it. There's no hurry."

Laura frowned. "But we might all die very soon."

"We might," he conceded. He thought of the reflected light in Alani's face, and the half-orange in Paras' hand, turned up to him. "That's no excuse not to do it right."

"It's very strange," Laura said. "I am not injured, and yet I feel pain."

Below them, Nori set a tree on fire with a blast of lightning and sped away into the woods. David shouted at her blurry back, and then did something complicated with snow and tree branches that put the fire out.

Victor sat beside Laura and watched until the smoke vanished.

 


End file.
